Howard Kendall: There should be no complaints with derby point

Luis Suarez scores a winning goal for Liverpool FC against Everton FC, only for it to be ruled out

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SOMETIMES there’s just no pleasing some football supporters – especially after a Merseyside derby. The 219th showdown was a wonderful game, packed full of incidents and excitement, but both sets of fans were grumbling on the local radio phone-ins afterwards.

From an Everton manager’s point of view, when you go 2-0 down against your city rivals to fight back to 2-2 and then get a decision going for you in the last seconds of the game which saves you a heart-breaking defeat, you’ve got to be happy with that.

In hindsight it’s not the type of result you complain about.

The linesman who got that late goal call wrong aside, I thought the officials did well. Compared to the Chelsea versus Manchester United game the referee was okay. At least he kept 22 players on the pitch and didn’t brandish any unnecessary red cards, like we’ve seen so often in this fixture.

He could have sent people off too. Luis Suarez was lucky with his stamp on Distin, and it really annoys me that players who have been injured in a tackle that sees the opponent booked still have to go off the pitch and wait to come back on. It’s an unfair disadvantage.

When it’s simply an incident of a player being injured but no foul, then by all means ask him to go off and come back on – it could deter fakers. But otherwise, it makes the team who have lost a man have to change their system even for a minute or so which can be costly.

I see Steven Gerrard apologised for his comments comparing Everton to Stoke and rightly so. However, that post match period is dangerous for players when they’re still pumped up and can be tempted to say things without thinking.

THERE was plenty of talk about diving before the derby and it always reminds me just how much the game has changed.

When I had Trevor Steven at Everton he was the type of player who would never dream of going down easily – quite the opposite.

He’d glide across the pitch going past defenders with ease and when he used to get into the area he was that quick there was always likely to be contact from the defender.

Trevor would stumble and do everything he could to stay on his feet and sometimes I’d have to say to him, ‘If there’s contact you can go down – it’s not cheating!’.

He was just such an honest, determined player it would never have occurred to him to throw himself down with the merest touch of a defender.

There are not many like him these days that’s for sure.

Saying that, on the topic of diving Luis Suarez took some criticism before the game for his reputation but he didn’t actually dive during it – only that celebration in front of David Moyes after Leighton Baines’ own goal.

It was clearly a pre-planned thing and something he’d probably devised after reading Moyes’ comments. When all’s said and done it was quite funny and Moyes handled it well.

IT seems like more goals are flying in than ever before in English football at the moment – and I wonder if the art of defending is on the decline.

The first job for a manager used to be getting a solid, dependable back four which can defend.

Now it often seems to be about having defenders who can pass and play it from the back, but when you are being attacked by the opposition you need the fundamentals like being able to tackle and being good in the air.

These things seem to have slipped down the list of priorities for some reason – and we’re seeing the results with some crazy scores. Call me old fashioned but I like defenders who could defend.